SIVACRACY.NET

As Cathy Davidson writes, teaching well matters a lot to the success and eventual promotion of junior faculty:

This morning I was invited to give a talk on the conflict some junior faculty feel between research and teaching in the academy. The conflict, of course, is that both are incredibly labor-intensive activities and, in the end, there are only so many hours in a day. But I think part of the conflict too is a state of mind: we put so much emphasis on publishing scholarship as the road to tenure, that junior faculty are often shocked to find that teaching counts.

And it does. In fact, at every institution with which I have been affiliated (junior college, large state university, Ivy League school, and now Duke), teaching is the bottom line. But it is often an unspoken bottom line. Too often it is simply assumed that you are an excellent teacher and the scholarship and service to the profession builds upon that. Peer-review focuses on scholarship and that probably skews what is or is not important to the profession. If the teaching is good, then all eyes focus on those letters from peers, letters that (necessarily, because they come from other institutions) focus on publications or performances at scholarly meetings. But when the teaching is poor, it becomes the subject of a lot of discussion in closed faculty meetings among the tenured. More subtly, bad teaching often colors the discussion of everything else. It’s the “insider secret” of the profession: teaching counts.

If the teaching is weak, a hyper-critical pall is cast over everything else. It is relatively rare that an abominable teacher who is not contributing to the field by training the next generation is rewarded solely for brilliant scholarship. The poor teaching raises deep questions about quality and character, of the person and the scholarship. Is the work really so brilliant? Is it worth it? Our majors are declining. Can we really afford to give one of our precious slots to someone who does not contribute to our shared goals, who does not carry his/her weight? (NB: If you are a cynic, and remain unconvinced by my argument that teaching counts, think of it this way: Senior scholars are not necessarily altruistic; they don't lightly give a pass to someone who makes their jobs harder, no matter how brilliant that junior person may be.) ...

One of the reasons so many people assume that teaching does not matter at research universities is that so many have had to sit through bad courses and could not understand how this professor got to keep her or his job. That's a fair question. But as Cathy points out, those are often the professors most challenged during annual reviews and promotion/tenure reviews. Of course, teaching effectiveness is even more subjective and fluid than "scholarly excellence" and "significant contribution to the field" and all the other "standards" we invoke during the review process.

It's also important to remember that we are rarely the same teacher one semester to the next. Last semester, my first at UVA, was one of the best performances I have ever put on in the classroom. That followed about five consecutive sub-par teaching semesters at NYU. My student reviews did not reveal my weaknesses, mostly because I have become so adept at hiding them behind tricks and jokes. But I knew it. I had many excuses (parenthood, the last-minute scramble to submit stuff before tenure, the job search last year, etc.). But life, writing, committee work, and outside review work (not to mention blogging) are always distracting us from the classroom. I certainly am not as good a teacher as I was five years ago. And I might never be as good as I was in graduate school. This is one reason why US News rankings drive me crazy. It seems to think having tenured professors teaching undergrads is a good thing. In fact, having younger, hungrier, more curious, fresher, and recently educated people teach undergrads is so much better.

That said, I think Cathy is basically right. I would qualify her observations, however. At NYU, no one in the administration cared about teaching at all. That's because no one in charge at NYU cared about the students at all, as long as their checks cleared. The classrooms were horrible. Faculty were never rewarded for putting in extra service time for students. And teaching was considered a burden by most. But at other places I have taught like Wesleyan, Columbia, and Virginia, bad teachers get the ax all the time (or, more commonly, never hired). I suspect that Cathy has been fortunate to work for a string of institutions at which teaching mattered. Not everyone has had that experience.